Definition
Geofencing draws a virtual boundary around a location, a depot, customer site, or restricted zone, and triggers alerts when a vehicle enters, exits, or dwells too long inside it.
Geofences enforce authorised routes and stops, flag unauthorised detours (a common fuel-theft signal), and automate arrival/departure logging at customer sites.
A geofence is a boundary drawn on a map and attached to a rule. Two shapes cover almost every fleet use case.
The rule attached to the boundary matters as much as the shape. Entry and exit are the obvious triggers, but dwell time is usually the more valuable one: knowing a vehicle entered a customer site is routine, and knowing it has been inside for four hours is an exception worth acting on.
The most common failure of a geofencing deployment is not technical. It is that the fleet creates hundreds of fences with entry and exit alerts on all of them, receives thousands of notifications a day, and stops reading any of them.
GPS drift makes this worse. A vehicle parked exactly on a boundary will appear to cross it repeatedly as the position estimate wanders, producing a stream of enter and exit events from a stationary vehicle.
Three adjustments fix most of it. Size fences generously so the boundary does not sit where vehicles park. Use a minimum dwell threshold so a brief crossing does not trigger. And alert on exceptions rather than on normal events: the useful alert is "has not left after three hours", not "arrived".
A geofence is a boundary around a place and triggers on entering, leaving or dwelling inside it. A route is a path between places. Fleets often combine them, using a corridor of fences along a planned route to detect deviation from it.
Accuracy depends on GPS position quality, typically within a few metres in the open and worse near tall buildings or under cover. This is why very small fences produce false crossings, and why a minimum dwell time is normally set before an event is raised.
Indirectly, and effectively. Siphoning requires the vehicle to stop somewhere it was not meant to stop. A geofence rule that flags halts outside authorised areas, especially at night, surfaces exactly those events, and pairing it with fuel-level data confirms whether fuel actually left the tank.
Fewer than most fleets start with. Creating a fence for every location and alerting on every entry and exit produces alert fatigue within days. Fence the places where an exception genuinely needs action, and prefer dwell-time and non-arrival rules over routine arrival notifications.
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